Pig Candy with Crushed Pistachios

Pig Candy with Crushed Pistachios? You read that right. I took pig candy and added crushed pistachios. Oh, did I mention I also added real maple syrup? To be fair, I must warn you, this is positively addictive. The finest confectioners from France and Switzerland have nothing on on THIS candy!

Pig Candy with Crushed Pistachios Ingredients:

For this cook, I used my Traeger Timberline Wood Fire Pellet Grill with apple wood pellets. I actually put four pounds on the Timberline and could’ve easily added two more pounds. This cooker is ideal for pig candy as all three grill grates are shielded from the fire so no grease hits open flame.

***Pro Tip ~ Pull the grill grates out of the grill before you light the cooker. Place the bacon on the cold grill grates and season them there and then put the grill grates (and bacon) back in the smoker. It’s real, REAL hard to place cold bacon onto hot grill grates and season it. If you use baking sheets, the bacon sits in the grease and the seasoning washes off***

Lay out the bacon across the cool grill grates:

Then hit each slice of bacon with the real maple syrup (Real Tomato Ketchup, Eddie? Sorry, I had to!)

***Pro tip numero dos ~ Transfer the syrup into a condiment squirt bottle to make it easier to apply a line of syrup to each slice of bacon***

Next up is the brown sugar. There’s no easy way of doing this, so just sprinkle it on as thick or as thin as you like along with a little crushed red pepper and coarse cracked black pepper:

Now it’s time to take care of some pistachios:

Crush, chop, and generally maim the whole pistachios until they become small enough to stick to the bacon:

How small? I don’t know. Small, but not too small.

Next up, they go into my 300 degree Traeger and after about 30 minutes the pig candy with crushed pistachios looks like this:

After an hour the bacon candy is looking great:

After 2 hours, the sweets have melted into the bacon, the pistachios and pepper are melded into the meat and each slice has firmed up:

Aaaaaaaand we’re ready to plate:

I highly recommend making well more than you think you should make. As I mentioned pig candy with crushed pistachios is addictive. Case in point. I have three sons ages, 9, 7 and 4 at the time of this posting. I thought I told each of them they could have one slice or that they could have one slice but no more until I was done taking the pictures, I can’t exactly remember now. Well two of them got the message, had their one slice, and went back to doing whatever kids that age do. The middle one, after I finished shooting, came back again and again and again. I’m not entirely sure how many slices of pig candy he had, but it was close to his age if not more. I call this candy for adults, as we used to make this on Halloween and give it to the guardians of the trick or treaters, but it is obviously candy that can be appreciated by someone of any age, particularly since it was my late grandfather’s favorite thing that I grilled (and that was without the maple syrup and pistachios!).

Scott Thomas

Scott Thomas, the Original Grillin’ Fool, was sent off to college with a suitcase and a grill where he overcooked, undercooked and burned every piece of meat he could find. After thousands of failures, and quite a few successes, nearly two decades later he started a website to show step by step, picture by picture, foolproof instructions on how to make great things out of doors so that others don’t have to repeat the mistakes he’s made on the grill.

2 comments

Hey Scott , first time fool, long time griller! Love your site a lot ! I don’t write many reviews …. but your site deserves it. Super fun. Going to use your recipes as a bucket list for this years football season.